Posted on 07/14/2008 5:05:59 PM PDT by K-oneTexas
Enemy Has a Name
by Daniel Pipes
Issue 111 - July 9, 2008
If you cannot name your enemy, how can you defeat it? Just as a physician must identify a disease before curing a patient, so a strategist must identify the foe before winning a war. Yet Westerners have proven reluctant to identify the opponent in the conflict the U.S. government variously (and euphemistically) calls the "global war on terror," the "long war," the "global struggle against violent extremism," or even the "global struggle for security and progress."
This timidity translates into an inability to define war goals. Two high-level U.S. statements from late 2001 typify the vague and ineffective declarations issued by Western governments. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defined victory as establishing "an environment where we can in fact fulfill and live [our] freedoms." In contrast, George W. Bush announced a narrower goal, "the defeat of the global terror network" – whatever that undefined network might be.
"Defeating terrorism" has, indeed, remained the basic war goal. By implication, terrorists are the enemy and counterterrorism is the main response.
But observers have increasingly concluded that terrorism is just a tactic, not an enemy. Bush effectively admitted this much in mid-2004, acknowledging that "We actually misnamed the war on terror." Instead, he called the war a "struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."
A year later, in the aftermath of the 7/7 London transport bombings, British prime minister Tony Blair advanced the discussion by speaking of the enemy as "a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide religion of Islam." Soon after, Bush himself used the terms "Islamic radicalism," "militant Jihadism," and "Islamo-fascism." But these words prompted much criticism and he backtracked.
By mid-2007, Bush had reverted to speaking about "the great struggle against extremism that is now playing out across the broader Middle East." That is where things now stand, with U.S. government agencies being advised to refer to the enemy with such nebulous terms as "death cult," "cult-like," "sectarian cult," and "violent cultists."
In fact, that enemy has a precise and concise name: Islamism, a radical utopian version of Islam. Islamists, adherents of this well funded, widespread, totalitarian ideology, are attempting to create a global Islamic order that fully applies the Islamic law ( Shari‘a).
Thus defined, the needed response becomes clear. It is two-fold: vanquish Islamism and help Muslims develop an alternative form of Islam. Not coincidentally, this approach roughly parallels what the allied powers accomplished vis-à-vis the two prior radical utopian movements, fascism and communism.
First comes the burden of defeating an ideological enemy. As in 1945 and 1991, the goal must be to marginalize and weaken a coherent and aggressive ideological movement, so that it no longer attracts followers nor poses a world-shaking threat. World War II, won through blood, steel, and atomic bombs, offers one model for victory, the Cold War, with its deterrence, complexity, and nearly-peaceful collapse, offers quite another.
Victory against Islamism, presumably, will draw on both these legacies and mix them into a novel brew of conventional war, counterterrorism, counterpropaganda, and many other strategies. At one end, the war effort led to the overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan; at the other, it requires repelling the lawful Islamists who work legitimately within the educational, religious, media, legal, and political arenas.
The second goal involves helping Muslims who oppose Islamist goals and wish to offer an alternative to Islamism's depravities by reconciling Islam with the best of modern ways. But such Muslims are weak, being but fractured individuals who have only just begun the hard work of researching, communicating, organizing, funding, and mobilizing.
To do all this more quickly and effectively, these moderates need non-Muslim encouragement and sponsorship. However unimpressive they may be at present, moderates, with Western support, alone hold the potential to modernize Islam, and thereby to terminate the threat of Islamism.
In the final analysis, Islamism presents two main challenges to Westerners: To speak frankly and to aim for victory. Neither comes naturally to the modern person, who tends to prefer political correctness and conflict resolution, or even appeasement. But once these hurdles are overcome, the Islamist enemy's objective weakness in terms of arsenal, economy, and resources means it can readily be defeated.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org), director of the Middle East Forum, is Taube/Diller distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. © 2008 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
The enemy is Islam itself, not “Islamism.” Kill or convert. That’s what’s in Islam’s DNA. That’s been Islam’s history in word and deed. Why do we in the West dance around this? It’s time for a new Crusade.
We KNOW the name of the enemey. Its just that our Government fears to use it because the media and the Dem Party would use it for base politics against America.
I know the enemey I do not fera it the media or Democrats. The enemy is Islam.
Islam itself has defined the terms. “We must submit or die.” Well, there is a third option.
Facism and communism are two aspects of the same ideology, which is grounded in Marxism. Socialism, whether the democratic variety or the dictatorial variety, is just another aspect of that ideology.
"Islamism," as Pipes prefers to call it, combines religious fanaticism with the facist variant of Marxism. One need only study the history of the early 20th Century to realize that terror and violence are hallmarks of how movements grounded in Marxist ideology sieze power.
The soviet communists in Russia, the national socialists in Germany, the Marxist/communists in China, Cuba, Vietnam, and countless other countries in Africa and Latin America, all demonstrate the brutality and totalitarian impulses inherent in this ideology.
In this year of our Lord, two thousand and eight, the United States is faced with the possibility that an openly avowed Marxist will be elected as our president. Obama is not only an avowed Marxist, but his own words mark him as an Islamist sympathizer, at the very least.
We simply must do all in our power to keep Obama from being elected.
Even if we didn't have it coming, didn'tcha get the memo that those dastardly "RINOs" and "CINOs" are the real enemy? Shucks, it won't matter if that Marxist empty suit, Obama, gets elected, because it won't take the American people long to be sick of him.
Even if they don't get sick of him, the Dems will get the blame for all the bad things that'll happen in the next four years.
Then the country will turn to the "real" conservatives to pick up the pieces, dontcha know.
Of course, while Obama's president, we could very well wake up on more than one fine, sunny morning to see scenes such as those you posted cluttering up our TeeVee screens. Wouldn't that be a bummer.
If that happens, don't blame me for (a) not voting, (b) voting for some minority party candidate, or (c) writing in the name of someone most of the country never heard of before. After all, I have principles.
Note to the clueless: The above is pure irony.
A good argument can be made that Islam is due for a “Protestant Reformation”, as struck Catholicism in the 16th Century. And in the peripheries of Islam, it is beginning to take place.
In essence, it is the reinterpretation of Islam to *ignore* some of the written word, and rationalize away most of its repulsive character. Think of it as beneficial hypocrisy.
To a Muslim in the 1980s, I once rationalized jihad, by imagining it as a “spiritual struggle”, not as a physical struggle. Supporting this theory, I pointed out that Muslims who physically fought against others in the name of jihad, fail, with them and their people crushed, and their lands left in ruins.
However, Muslims who do not raise their hand at others and are peaceful outside, but struggle, and have jihad within themselves, as a spiritual fight, are successful in the world. They prosper and are respected.
Q.E.D., Allah favors the spiritual jihad, and punishes physical, violent jihad. Importantly, he seems to strongly favor even infidels over Islamists, with just about everyone able to beat them.
It is a rationalization, and I’m sure it is a pretty weak one. However, most Muslims are willing to entertain such ideas, because they are not violent Islamists, and in fact are pretty sick of Islamists, their ideas, their violence, and their bitter failure, murder and destruction.
Right now, in Turkey, this very process of reformation is underway:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7264903.stm
“Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.”
Other such reform ideas are being proposed in Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, and elsewhere.
Even on the “Muslim street”, there are frequent arguments about Islamic religion vs. culture. Many Muslim women, especially, are rejecting burkas and veils in favor of just a light headscarf. And they are more than willing to point out that the Koran only specifies “modesty” in both men and women, not wrapping themselves up in bedsheets and staying indoors.
Perhaps the biggest sticking point is that religious training in Islam is almost an exclusive monopoly of the Wahabbi sect, who have strong Islamist beliefs. The means that around the world, more moderate sects are ranted at by the Wahabbi Imam from the pulpit. And these Wahabbi madrassas are heavily supported by Saudi Arabia, which is half ruled by the Wahabbi sect.
There just aren’t enough Imams from the other sects to go around.
So there is much to be done in any Islamic Reformation. But it is assuring that a lot of Muslims are trying.
The term “War on Terror” was stupid when the gubmint came up with it, and is stupid now. Terrorism is a tactic, nothing more, nothing less. We did not call what we were doing in Europe in WWII the “War on Blitzkreig”, that would have been ridiculous. Of course, back then we were more concerned with actually defining our enemies and winning the war, rather than worrying about possibly offending those same enemies.
That is one of the best posts I have read here in quite some time.
Thanks. :)
jihad bump
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